Logics of Ethos and the translations of Unheimlich

Wu Tianzhang and the Post-Martial Law Era in Taiwan

Joyce Chi-Hui Liu

I

This paper poses
questions related to the double-edged translation of the logic of ethos in the post-martial law era in
Taiwan. I will focus on the visual dimension of the politics of translation,
through cultural policies, aesthetic discourses and artistic practices, and will
try to respond to the question raised by Rada Iveković in her article “On permanent
translation,” that is, the insufficiency of language, the inadequacy of
the human being to itself, and every institution's inadequacy to its purpose.[1] I would especially like to
focus on the complicated issue of the ethnic partitions and frictions in Taiwan
between “wai-sheng-ren” (the mainlanders) and “ben-sheng-ren” (local
Taiwanese), the partitions caused by the institutionalized cultural and
language policies during the martial law period in Taiwan, the state of
emergency, and the effects of it that remained in the post-martial law era. So-called “wai-sheng-ren,” literally the ones from outside of the
province, refers to the two million refugees, retreated with the KMT regime (KMT,
meaning Kuomintang, i.e., the Nationalist party) after their defeat in the
civil war against the Chinese communists, and their descendents; and “ben-sheng-ren”
refers to the descendants of early immigrants, mainly from
southern Fujian. I
shall take Wu Tianzhang’s art works as a thread that links us to the core of
the subtle issue of ethnic partitions. Wu Tianzhang’s (b. 1956) techniques of
the un-heimlich translated and
transplanted the sense of abject and ethnic border deeply experienced by
Taiwanese “ben-sheng-ren” onto the surface of the canvas and revealed the
unutterable subjective conditions during the martial law era.

A brief sketch
of the historical conditions of Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth
century is required here. In recent history, the
ownership of Taiwan government has been drastically turned over twice, through
military force and high political oppression, first from the hands the Chin
government to that of Japan in 1895, and then from Japan to the KMT government
in 1945. In 1945, after the termination of the Japanese colonial period (1894-1945),
the KMT regime of the Republic of China sent Governor-General
Chen Yi to be in charge of
Taiwan. The corruption of the Chen Yi government and the chaotic situation
caused by the inflation of the rice market soon disappointed and irritated the
general public. The 228 Incident in 1947,[2]
the civilians’ protest against the Monopoly Bureau agents who used excessive
force on an old woman peddling untaxed cigarettes, immediately grew into an
island-wide armed riot. Crowds of people seized police stations, arms and
radio stations, and even killed some “wai-sheng-ren” in the streets. This riot was put down by force by reinforced Nationalist troops
from the mainland. Up to eight thousands, and some reports said twenty-eight
thousands, of “ben-sheng-rens” were killed in the incident and its aftermath. The “State of
Emergency” was declared and the Martial Law was imposed on Taiwan which lasted
for nearly 40 years, from 1948 to 1987.

What is
complicated in this historical process is the logic of ethos and of heim that is
constructed through the cultural and language policies. The use of Japanese
language was forbidden. Japanese publications, newspapers, magazines, music and
movies were banned. Not only the intellectuals who received high education in
the Japanese colonial period soon lost their influence in society, but also the
majority of the population was denied access to higher social ranks because of
the language policy. The subsequent cultural and language policies during the
1950s and 1960s banning the use of Taiwanese dialect in public increased the
forced suppression of “ben-sheng-ren.”[3] The ethnic partition and
social hierarchy were consolidated through these policies. Furthermore, the
education and promotion of the Chinese traditional culture were re-enforced.
The mainland was taken as the cultural homeland, and the sentiments of
nostalgia were expressed by the entire generation of artists, writers and the
general public. The second generation of the mainlanders and the post-228
generation of the local Taiwanese shared the same nostalgic sentiments for the
homeland.

The stability of
this political state was gradually shaken after the Republic of China retreated
from the United Nations,[4]
the international relations and political recognition cut off, and public
disclosure of the KMT government’s violation of human rights in the white
terror period. Kaohsiung Incident[5]
in 1978 brought people’s awareness of the political terrorism of the KMT
government to the surface. The debates over a “Chinese consciousness” and a
“Taiwanese consciousness” during 1983 and 1984 further crystallized the polemic
of the confusing issue of Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese consciousness.[6]
Thomas B. Gold has noted that the “quest for a unique Taiwan identity” began early
in the mid-1970’s, along with Taiwan's “increased diplomatic isolation and the
rise of the tangwai, the dissident
party”.[7]
Gold also pointed out that, in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, “defining Taiwanese
identity is still a process at the stage of rediscovering a history comprised
of a diverse array of components, but it has become a conscious project”.[8]

Wu Tianzhang was born in 1956 in
Keelong, a northern harbor city of Taiwan. He graduated from the Chinese
Cultural University as a student of art in 1980, and began his career as an artist
from early 1980s.[9] Wu Tianzhang’s
art works from mid-1980s to early 1990s presented to us his self-conscious
radical protests against the violence done by the KMT regime during the martial
law era.[10] In the mid-1990s Wu Tianzhang switched his concern to the problems
of home, or heim, or the awkwardness
attached to the status of Taiwanese-ness.[11]
In the 2000s, he began a new series making fun of the moral jargons of “being-together” through
a mixture of the pseudo-reincarnation narratives, folkloric circus gestures and
the technique of high-tech digital image-making.[12]

In between these drastically
different stages, I find the transitional projects in mid-1990s most puzzling
but also most revealing. In these series of paintings, we no longer see the anger, accusations, protests and frontal
criticisms in the hard lines and edges of the masculine bodies presented in his
protest series in the first stage, nor do we see the detached and hilarious
laugh about the
pretense and futility of “being together” in the latest
projects yet. Instead,
we see demure but seductive and performative gestures of figures of the past,
the marine sailor with the guitar, the school girl and woman dressed in the
fashion of the 1950s and 1960s in Taiwan, the citations of images taken from
the posters of cigarette advertisement of the 1930s in Shanghai, a painting of
the market place of the 1950s by local Taiwanese painter Li Shiqiao, and a film
poster by Hou Xiaoxian about a story of a small town in the 1960s. The backdrop
of the pseudo photo-studio, the stylized rococo studio settings, the famous
tourist spot Spring and Autumn Pavilion of Zuoying, near the military camp in Kaohsiung,
also tell us about the time of the 1950s and 1960s in Taiwan. These complicated
citations and montages of images from different time spots all point to the
moments of the 1950s and 1960s in which the mainlanders, “wai-sheng’ren,” and
local Taiwanese, “ben-sheng-ren,” meet and the time in which all the problems
were originated. These meetings are full of ambiguous flirtations and
conspiracies. Women from mainland dressed in Shanghai style, women brought up
in the Japanese educational system dressed in discreet school uniforms,
feminized marine sailor holding guitar, with his genital organ protruding
within his pants, and family scenes with seductive gestures: all suggest some
sort of black humor and dark eroticism behind the serene scene of the familiar
place.

These pseudo-studio-photographs
were designed and framed up as photographs, decorated with painted frames and
artificial flowers, the artificial plastic flowers used for funerals in Taiwan.
The juxtaposition of innocence and flirtation, hidden malice behind the happy
faces of the family members, eros and death, and the collage of deceased still life, all suggest an altered and uncanny
milieu of the sight of familiarity, a familiar and cozy home that has changed
its face, a tinge of the unheimlich.[13]
This tone of the unheimlich reveals
the image-maker’s difficult and ambivalent attitudes toward home, or the place
to settle with.

The theme of the uncanny, the unheimlich, is metonymically represented
in the piece Wounded Landscape, the
first painting in these series, that he did in 1994. Though it is entitled as “wounded”
landscape, as the keynote of damage and injury in his previous works, beginning
with The Symptom
of the Syndrome of World Injury in 1986 to the series of “Wounded Funerals” in 1994, but in this
painting the center of the canvas is no longer the wounded figures. We see only
the façade of a desolate house, as if emerging from the darkness of the
background. This piece is a black and white photograph, tinted with spots of
green, purple and brownish colors, as in old photos. The center of the up-front
stage is an emptied-out space, lit with spot light. This empty space and the
gloss of the painted shiny blue frames captured our immediate attention. The
act of removing the figures of representation from the center of the frame is
symbolic. Wu Tianzhang had shifted his attention away from the external
violence and physical violations, and moved toward the violence hidden behind
the scene of familiarity. The violence referred to in these paintings of the
mid-1990s is the internal violence brought up by the changed relationships
established on the basis of home, of ethos.

II

To discuss Wu Tianzhang in the
context of the post-martial law era in Taiwan, and to examine the visual
politics and the logic of ethos employed by his contemporaries, I need to first
define the terms I use here in the context of visual culture. By visual
politics, I mean the visual rhetoric appropriated in artistic practices and
aesthetic discourses so that certain contesting political positions are thereby
posited. Such visual rhetoric would encourage the intervening, challenging and
disrupting forces of the repressed against the established order, but would
also assign at the same time the distribution, circulation and the duplication of
the images of a new order that are desired or anticipated by the contemporary
audience. The different sense of order is constituted by and founded on people’s
different sense of border, of ethos,
of the habitus, that is to say, bound
by different axis related to one’s own, including one’s custom, as in Greek ēthos, one’s family and kinship, as in Old
High German sippa, and one’s
comrade, as in Latin sodalist. What gestures are visible and invisible, desirable or
repulsive, beautiful or ugly, what gestures are expected to be looked at, are all
related to a larger system of ethos,
in other words, the sense of community, kinship, solidarity and comradeship
that are operating in concurrent societies.

To ask such questions is to take
visual culture not merely as the study of style or iconography, but as a complex
apparatus of signifying practices relating to the shared system of epistemology.
Visual culture tells us not only about the cultural models in which the
signifying processes are at work, the histories that are connoted in the use of
icons, but also the affective driving forces of the time that constitute our
sense of community. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall have
pointed out that “visual culture always provides a physical and psychical place
for individual spectators to inhabit.”[14]
To inhabit in certain physical and psychical space suggests the notion of a
familiar abode, of habitus, of home,
and a subjective sense of ethos.

To study the visual translation of the subjective sense of ethos is close to the history of
mentalities proposed by Jacques Le Goff. History of ideas, economy, politics or
battles cannot provide us sufficient materials to know more about the
subjective and affective dimensions of the community. Le Goff suggested that
underneath the coherently or logically organized surfaces of the cultural
texts, were involved different strata and fragments of past histories, that he called
“archaeopsychology.”[15]
The ambivalence of meanings attached to the cultural objects, ideas or visual
images led us into a complicated vascular network composed by multiple local
systems and diverse subject positions. Just as what Irit Rogoff has very nicely
stated, besides the contesting histories that constitute the visual images and
the cultural models that guide the viewing apparatus, there
are also “the subjectivities of identification or desire or abjection from
which we view and by which we inform what we view.”[16]

The questions awaiting
investigation in our study of visual translations of our histories and our
communities, regarding the issue of the logic of ethos, are such as the following - on what ground, for what purpose
and with what rhetoric is the sense of ethos
of a certain era constructed through visual images? How is this logic of ethos instituted through cultural and
language policies, and even functions as regulating, governing and policing
systems? How does it rationalize and execute the violence of domestic exclusion
at all? Finally, how are the logic of ethos,
the violence of domestic exclusion and the sense of bodily abjection translated
through visual images?

III

Wu Tianzhang’s art works in the 1980s
directly presented a world of violence, or a critique of violence. Beginning
with The Symptom
of the Syndrome of World Injury I-IV(1986), The Injury of the Red (1986),
The Injury of Taiwan (1988), to About the Dark Green Hurt (1989), Homage to the unknown hero--228 Memorial (1992),
Wu Tianzhang dealt
with the state of mind of Taiwanese people under the Martial Law and the cold
war conditions. Graduated as a student of modern art, and as a member of the Modern
Art Group of Taipei, Wu employed bold experimental techniques as a rebellion
against the conventional Chinese landscape brush painting and the modernist
abstract painting that were the canon in the 1970s. The recurring images of the
eye motif, the downward falling figures of the assassinated, murdered and
executed corpses, the repeated sites of the crime scenes, and the tall brick
prison wall, all speak about the feelings of damage, secrecy and fear in a
highly militarized, policed, watched and guarded environment, and the
collective memories of the warring history of the civil war, the traumatic
experience of the 228 Incident, and the ethnic hostility caused by it. Furthermore, there is also the
fear of being suspected of conspiracy with the red communists. In these
paintings, the figures and the gestures are all masculine and sharply edged.
The frames are disrupted or protruded by the out-stretching fists, arms or
wounded bodies. The anger against the suppressive environment is obvious and
direct. In the series regarding the dictatorship, including the Rule of Mao Zedong,
Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Jieshi, Jiang Jingguo (1990), Composite Damage I-II (1993), and Wounded Funerals I-IV (1994), the motifs
of injured individuals and conformed crowd fill up the space occupied by the
gigantic figures of political rulers. The deprivation of the senses and the
right to see, to speak, to hear and to smell, is synthesized with objects of
abjection on the canvas.

This thrusting force to break
loose the tight-jacket and the self-assured position of moral justice in Wu
Tianzhang’s art works echoed the momentum of the late 1980s and early 1990s in
Taiwan. In the mid-1980s, Taiwan society has already
started its restless revolts in different ways, enhanced by both ben-sheng-ren and wai-sheng-ren, mostly young people of the post-228 generations.
Literary, theatrical and artistic circles introduced post-modernist avant-garde
movements in order to challenge against the preceding conventions and
authorities. Little theatres and avant-garde artists performed political
dramatic works in the streets. Heated public forums debated about the
reformation and re-election of the national assembly which was composed by a
group of 90-years-old members elected in the 1920s. The criticism against the
control and censorship of newspapers, publications, performances, public
assembly and political parties were on daily newspapers. Students’ and laborers’
movements went on strikes to voice their protests.

Other artists, Wu Tianzhang’s contemporaries, such as Yang Maolin,
Hou Junmin, Mei Dingyan and Chen Jieren also shared similar patterns of
rebellious motifs. Take Yang Maolin as one quick example. In his series of Made in Taiwan, we see enlarged images
of steel-hard fists, arms and legs filling up the space of the canvas. The hard
lines of the muscles and the contour of the torso are highlighted. There is no
softness in the lines and the composition, nor is there any ambiguity. The
anger and accusation is clearly stated through the images.[17]

The year 1987 is a symbolic landmark that
witnessed not only the closure of the 40 years’ martial
law era in Taiwan, but also the emerging dynamics in the mutations of power
struggles in the political, aesthetic and cultural spheres. The avant-garde movements
in the art, literature, dance and theatre of the late 1980s, supported by both ben-sheng-ren and wai-sheng-ren, shared the same driving force of the time that
demanded a new order, a new order that could defy the dictatorship exercised
under the regime of the white terror. But this new order quickly acquired a new
logic of ethos and a new logic of heim in the 1990s. The heim-rhetoric of a different kind
emerged, the heim that is supported
by the concept of the people, “min-jian” （民間）, and is directed toward a
closed system of the ben-sheng
nativist narrative, nativist in terms of the language and the ethnic origin
applicable only to the early settlers. Some major changes in governmental cultural
policies in the 1990s indicated this shift of the nativist discursive mode.
Basing on the Statutes on the Establishment of the National Culture and Arts
Foundation, the National Culture and Arts Foundation was founded in 1996
and the awards for local-oriented art were established. Lee Denghui, former
president during 1996 to 2000, encouraged universities to cut down or even
abolish the courses related to China. Chen Shuibian, the current president
since 2000, stressed that the content of Taiwan Culture should build up its
subjectivity on Taiwan geography, Taiwan history and Taiwan life experience,
and that the objectives of textbooks should rid off the Chinese consciousness.
The main function of the Archive for National Culture, for example, is to
collect, preserve, analyze and publish the historical documents of Taiwan
culture, and to develop special features of local cultural resources so that
the subjectivity of Taiwan culture could be established.[18]
The lack of recognition in the international political arena and the stateless
condition of Taiwan made it all the more urgent to plead for a more solid
construction of subjectivity and identity.

Such emerging politics of heim is a reaction against, but also a
mirror that echoes and repeats the mainland-oriented politics of heim enforced by the KMT government’s cultural
and language policies. The only difference is that the myth of the heim, our “jiaxiang” (家鄉)
or “guxiang”（故鄉）,
is changed from the “middle-land” （中原）and
the “divine kingdom” （神州）,
which had triggered people’s nostalgias and passion, even for the post-228
generations of both ben-sheng-ren and
wai-sheng-ren, to the land of Taiwan,
also under the rhetoric of our “jiaxiang”
(家鄉) and “xiangtu” （鄉土）.

In the artistic discursive field,
a long series of debates on such topic rose up and lasted for nearly two years,
from 1991 to 1993.[19]
The long debates began with an article written in 1991 by Ni Zaiqin. Quoting
earlier writings by Lin Xingyue and another senior art history scholar, Xie
Lifa, Ni criticized the modernist movements in Taiwan art history from the
1950s to the 1980s. Following the arguments brought up by literary scholars
such as Yie Shitao, Song Dongyang ( aka Chen Fangming) and Peng Ruijin, Ni
suggested that “it is only natural and right for people who live in Taiwan to
identify with the land they live in, and to know its history,” and that “only
the art works that identify with Taiwan could be called Taiwan art.”[20]
Ni Zaiqin listed Li Shiqiao’s Tianyuan
Le (Harvest Joy), Li Meishu’s The Temple of Sansha, Hong Ruilin’s Working in a Mine as “the real
representation of the local life of Taiwan, a rustic and firm spirit that is
totally different from the style of the salon.”[21]
Among the artists during the second modernist wave in the 1980s, only Lu
Tianyan, Yang Maolin and Wu Tianzhang were considered by Ni Zaiqin as the ones
who embodied local consciousness. Ni Zaiqin’s article was followed up by over
twenty-five essays debating for or against his nativist positions.[22]

Lin Xingyue, an established artist
and art critic, made his statement in an article in 1993 and concluded the
debates: “Today, the localization of art is no longer a question whether we
want it or not, nor a question whether it is possible or not; the localization
of art has already been going on in a great scale. The question now is how to
facilitate it and help it move on the grand path.”[23]
To Lin Xingyue, this localization of Taiwan art is a matter of ethical issue:
“If anyone who has not concerned himself with Taiwan with all his heart, he
could not become the conscience of the time and could not take up the
responsibility of an intellectual.”[24]
The legitimacy of this ethical righteous position is derived from the people
and the local: “the foundation of people’ democracy is the autonomy of the
people, a civic society that would free itself from the domination of the
sacred authority.”[25]
Lin Xingyue’s article settled the debate and set the key tone that revealed the
discursive mode of the 1990s.

The 1996 Taipei Biennial: The Quest for Identity and the series of 2.28
Commemorative Exhibitions from 1996 onward are exemplary examples in this
nativist wave of identity construction. These series of exhibitions had its
educational purposes. Through recreating historical sites and images, these
exhibitions intend to foster the communal sense of identical cultural and
political positions.[26]
The intention to construct an appropriate cultural iconography through the
memorialization of the traumatic historic moment is manifest in these
exhibitions.[27] The
objectives set up by the curators of these exhibitions attracted artists to
submit art works of shared sentiments. These exhibitions answered the affective
demand of the epoch, along with the participating curators, artists as well as
the audiences, a demand that reflects the structure of feelings of the people
and shapes the emerging consciousness of community. But, a mode of distinction
is also formed. There is a certain side of “them” that were targeted in the
exhibition as the one to be accursed or condemned, and a certain side of “us” who
demanded apology, compensation, and even claimed the right to punish and
correct the wrong. The line between the internal, domestic and the same,
against the external, the foreign and the different, were exposed by the
intended viewing position structured in the image.

This act of icon-building leads us
to the question: what viewing positions are pre-inscribed in these images? Or
the question posed by Lacan: “where does the gaze come from?” “The social
function, which was already emerging at the religious level, is now becoming
clear. Who comes here? Those who form what Retz calls ‘les peuples’, the
audiences. And what do the audiences see in these vast compositions. They see
the gaze of those persons who, when the audiences are not there, deliberate in
this hall. Behind the picture, it is their gaze that is there.”[28]
It is the gaze of the “communal,” in the name of the people,
appropriated by the establishing power networking that is demanding the
audience to view the history from a particular position.

The ethical regime of images
discussed by Jacques Rancière could help us further explain this intricate
issue of the logic of ethos as
revealed in the politics of visual images. The visual images, according to Rancière,
share the same logic of the parallel historical narratives, the “modes of
discourse, forms of life, conceptions of thoughts, figures of the community,” as
well as the ability to act as “historical agents.”[29]
The logic of ethos, the constituting
force that determines the recognizable, the visible and the invisible, of
speech and noise, Rancière suggested, could be explained by the Kantian theory
of the system of a priori.[30]
We intuitively distinguish whether the images are acceptable or unacceptable,
desirable or resentful, holy or defiling, according to the normative forms of
knowledge and the unspoken habituswe share with the community. In the ethical regime of
images, therefore, it is a matter of “knowing in what way images’ mode of being
affects the ethos, the mode of being
of individuals and communities.”[31]
The ground of the ethos is not only a
“normative principle of inclusion,” but also the “principle regulating the
external delimitation of a well-founded domain of imitations.” Such logic of
the ethos, consequently, also
determines the “partitions between the representable and the unrepresentable.”[32]
Rancière also suggested that even the disruptive and revolutionary quality of
the avant-garde would have already been “assigned to contradictory political
paradigms.”[33] The
political position taken by the avant-garde, therefore, reveals the new ruling
political paradigm that is to come, and this is what we have observed in Taiwan
in the post-martial law era from the 1980s down to the present time.

IV

Wu Tianzhang’s art after mid-1990s,
however, presented to us a far more complex subject positions. There are no images
of political protests or physical violence anymore. Instead, we see portraits
of pseudo-salon photos, with women or feminized man posing in front of the
artificial studio landscape. One critic interpreted this change of style as the
artist’s self-conscious appropriation of traditional Taiwanese local and
folkloric elements to build up an alternative Taiwanese subjectivity and that
Wu’s strategy revealed a self-amending cultural apparatus to heal the wounded
feelings of the past.[34]
This view of “alternative Taiwanese subjectivity” presented to me a typical
communal desire in the public narrative of the 1990s to re-establish local
Taiwanese identity and subjectivity. In Wu Tianzhang’s series of the mid-1990s,
we actually see visual references to Taiwanese past in a more ambivalent
manner. Concerning these series, Wu Tianzhang himself said that there are two
particular themes he had in mind: first, the death captured by photographs, and
second, the typical shallowness of Taiwanese culture. It is true that these
paintings imitate salon photos of the style of the 1950s and 1960s in Taiwan.
It is also true that through the gaudiness of the dress, the shoes, the
hairstyle, the hats and the frippery sun glasses, we see what Wu Tianzhang
called “Tai-ke” （台客）. But, there are more subtle
twists of meanings to it.

“Tai-ke” originally is a pejorative term used by the wai-shegn-ren to mock at the shallowness
and vulgarity of local Taiwanese people, including the way they talk, the way
they dress, their white socks with black shoes, their slippers and their
accents.[35] Taiwanese
people’s sense of inferiority and wai-sheng-ren’s
prejudice converging at this term “Tai-ke.”
But, in Wu Tianzhang’s paintings of Tai-ke
and in the performative gestures these figures posed, instead of saying that “I
do not want to be the one you would laugh at,” or that “I’m presenting to you
what you would want me to change into,” these paintings seem to be saying that “here
I am,” “I’m not afraid of being looked at or laughed at,” and that “if you want
to laugh at me, I will give you more to look at and laugh at.”

In the feminized gestures and the
mixture of the cheapness, pretentiousness and gaudiness, a certain sarcastic
humor and love-hate sentiment are betrayed under Wu Tianzhang’s hands. Either
the feminized pose of the marine sailor with the erected genital organ, or the
discreetly dressed young lady and the high-school girl with their hands
covering their breasts, or the fashionable sing girls, taken from the Shanghai posters, wearing
glamorous plastic sunglasses and shiny artificial glass jewels, with golden
paillette on the frames, all suggest an highly exaggerated performativity
coated with layers of fakeness and kitsch. These kitsch objects are used in
daily life in Taiwanese culture. Wu Tianzhang laboriously added thick layers of
these kitsch objects on the canvases and shiny paints and funeral flowers on
the frames. In addition, the rococo salon settings, the pagoda and the painted
sailboat added with fringes of colorful textile, the glass diamonds pasted on
the peacock tail, solid gold pendulum, the plastic sun-glasses, all reinforced
the repetitive rhythm of fakeness and flamboyance. These armors of objects of
fakeness and floridly displayed kitsch are objects of abject, just as the
shimmering gloss on the surface of the painted shiny frames, conveyed a
sensation of nauseating sickness, and staged a black comedy that tells about
the status of Taiwanese-ness.

The series of Home Sweet Home I-II (1996) and the
Worldly Life I-II (1997) carried on the motifs in the two series of Spring and Autumn Pavilion (1993) and Dream of Past Eva (1997). The ping-pong
ball that was stuffed into the mouth and the sunflower
that covered the eyes in
Synthesized
Damage re-appears here in Worldly Life and in Home
Sweet Home. Here, it is the teen-age boy, stuffed with the ping-pong ball in the mouth, trotting along the road innocently and happily, and
the mother ready to powder the baby with the puff, echoing the ping-pong ball motif. The political censorship is executed in a civil but unconscious
mode, through the hands of family members, in the family scene.

What does it mean for Wu Tianzhang
to be addressed as a Tai-ke? Why did
he work on the series of paintings of the image of the vulgar and tasteless
figures, with the thin film of oily gloss on the frames and the artificial
cheap objects, the oily film of gloss that he said in the interview would make
him shiver? Or, gooseflesh, he said. Born in Kee-long, the northern
harbor city with the fishermen as his neighbors, seeing the dead or dying fish
in the markets, the market ground and the street corners spilt with filthy
water, with oily surface, seems to be his primary impression of his childhood
memory. The loud electronic band and strip girls for the funerals, the bar
girls associated with navy of the US 7th Fleet, the girls dressed
with fake jewelry and shiny dress, are also his childhood memories. Coming to
Taipei in his teenage to study, he was mocked at as a Tai-ke because he was dressed as one, and he also felt as one. He
said in one interview that, at that young age, he felt a keen traumatic
experience of the “ethnic discrimination” brought by this phrase. The subtle
differentiation between tai-ke and
the wai-sheng-ren is reinforced by
the distinction made by the language policy during the 1960s and 1970s.

Instead of charging his protests
and anger, Wu Tianzhang allowed himself to perform the feminized position of Tai-ke, displayed the altered scenes of
familiarity, translated and transplanted his sense of
abject onto the
surface of the canvas, a technique of the un-heimlich,
or the technique of epidermization.

V

We are brought back to the
question of ethos, the familiar
custom of the common abode, and the logic of heim that serves as the guiding principle of ethical considerations
and value judgments. Our ethical, aesthetic as well as political judgments are
involved with the logic of ethos, our
accustomed modes of thinking, hierarchy of meaning-making, networks of personal
relations, sense of duty, and the experience of free choice. It is then a
question of Dasein, as suggested by Jean-Luc
Nancy: “Dasein would be
being-obliged, its Da would not be a there, but would be its summons by an
order. Or the there would only be the there
of the being summoned-there by the imperative.”[36]
The unquestioned imperative of this order of ethos poses a problem. As Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “if ethos means (whatever the etymological
debate about it) Heim, a home,
familiar place: the animal’s lair, man’s cavern or cave,” then what we are
faced with is “the opening and the question of an Unheimlich ethos.”[37]
The law that constitutes the mode of appearance and of ethos then is the question to be asked. As Heidegger put it, “we
cannot discuss the problem of the finitude of the ethical being if we do not
pose the question: What does ‘law’ [Gesetz] mean here, and how is the
lawfulness itself constitutive for Dasein
and for the personality?”[38]

Such are the questions that
inspired the current project. But, in this paper, I have pointed to a different
set of questions and a different path of thinking: How is the ‘law’ physically
and emotionally experienced? What are the affective residues of the effect of
the law that are translated through visual images? What are the images through
which people are propelled to assume or to exclude? How do the images stage and
perform the abject positions and ethnic borders experienced by the subject?

The banal objects, accessories,
the un-heimlich nauseating sensation
on the shiny frames and the surface of the cloths, to me, suggest a space of
perpetration and complicity which has translated the untranslatable conditions
of the past. We could borrow the concept introduced by Jean Baudrillard in his
discussion of “The Trompe-L’Oeil” that, on the space of the collaged objects, “the
pleasure they procure is thus not the aesthetic one of a familiar reality, it
is the acute and negative pleasure found in the abolition of the real […]. Only
isolated objects, abandoned, ghostly in their ex-inscription of all action and
all narrative, could retrace the haunting memory of a lost reality, something
like a life anterior to the subject and its coming to consciousness.”[39]
On the canvas created by Wu Tianzhang, I would like to suggest, some sort oftrompe-l’oeil is going on. The background and the setting are only
excuses for the dislocated
objects, banal accessories, and disguised masks to appear. Through the
assemblage of accessories, and through the sense of tactile, a preexistent life
and death is pushed forward, the ghost of the past that haunts the emptiness of
the stage. The sickening and nauseating sensation of the skin is exteriorized first on the frames, and then transferred on
the surface of the cloth of the distorted figures and the compressed smiles of
the figures in the 2000s projects. As Rada Ivekovic’s
keen observation: “It is the state of being in translation oneself. And this
is the cost of translation remaining faithful to life and retaining its
gesture: it constantly avoids putting itself in a state of grace; that is to
say, exception; that is to say, finitude.”[40]

Through Wu Tianzhang’s art,
the controversy of ‘heimlich’ (‘homely’) and ‘heimisch’ (‘native’) is played upon, and the secrecy,
untrustworthy, disagreeable and unfamiliar elements of the native/home is
brought to the surface on the canvas. Different from his contemporary Chen
Jieren who staged the historical trauma through the digital images of
self-mutilation, Wu Tianzhang staged his sense of the abject through the
stylization of the fakeness
and kitsch. The sense of inferiority, abjection and puzzlement
experienced by the Taiwanese during the martial law era is externalized and
staged through the
technique of epidermization, or the translation of un-heimlich, by Wu Tianzhang via
repeatedly working through and laying bare the abject on the canvas.

[4] The Republic of China (ROC; Taiwan) was
a founding member of the United Nations (UN) in 1945. However, in 1971, the
People's Republic of China (PRC) succeeded in taking the seat held previously
by the ROC following the passage of UN Resolution 2758. Since then, most UN
members have switched their diplomatic allegiance from Taipei to Beijing. In
1979, the United States severed diplomatic ties with the ROC and abrogated the
1954 Mutual Defense Treaty. In the absence of formal relations, the Taiwan
Relations Act was passed by the US Congress to maintain substantive ties with
Taiwan, including the sale of defensive weaponry to help defend Taiwan. See http://www.gio.gov.tw/taiwan-website/5-gp/yearbook/03History.htm#ROC

[5] In the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, Kuomintang's military and
police broke up the island's first major Human Rights Day celebration (10
December 1979), and subsequently arrested and imprisoned virtually all leading
members of Taiwan's budding democratic movement. One of the major issues in the
Formosa Magazine, the organizer for the Human Rights Day Celebration, was to
disclose the historical tragedy of the February Twenty-Eighth in 1947 (the “228
Incident”) , which had been suppressed immediately after the Erection of
Martial Law in 1950. The tortures these people suffered during the
imprisonment, non-stop interrogations, beatings, punching, cigarettes scorching,
were severe. The Kaohsiung Incident
galvanized most people’s political conscience, some along with the incident,
some gradually in the following years. For a brief introduction to the
background of these political events and social changes, please consult Yang
Bi-chuan’s Taiwan Lishi Cidian
(Dictionary of Taiwan History), or “The ‘Kaohsiung Incident’ of 1979: A turning point in Taiwan's history. http://www.taiwandc.org/history.htm.

[6] The debates over the
"origin" of Taiwanese literature and culture, or the definition of
the history of Taiwanese literature, has been carried on since early 1980. The
term "Taiwanese literature" was established during the debate on this
issue during 1983-1984. Representative views on the "Chinese
consciousness" or the "Taiwanese consciousness" in Taiwanese literature
and culture include: Yie Shitao's "Continuing the umbilical cord of the
mother country--on the rise and fall of the Chinese consciousness and the
Taiwanese consciousness in Taiwanese literature over the past forty
years", Lin Ruiming's "The Studies of Taiwanese Literature under the
Conflict of National Identity," Ma Sen's "The Chinese Knot and the
Taiwanese Knot in Taiwanese Literature," Chen Zhaoying's "On the
Localization Movement in Taiwan: A Study on Cultural History," and Chen
Fangming's "Taiwanese Literature and Taiwanese Style over the hundred
years--An Introduction to the New Taiwanese Literature Movement." A good
overview of the above-mentioned debates, please see Zhang, Wenzhi. The Taiwanese Consciousness in Contemporary
Literature. Taipei: Zili News Press 1993.

[10] The works he did during late 1980s and
early 1990s. For example, The Injury of the Red (1986),
The Symptom of the Syndrome of World Injury (1986), The Injury of Taiwan (1988),
and the Rule of Mao Zedong, Deng
Xiaoping, Jiang Jieshi, Jiang Jingguo (1990).

[11] For example, the Dream of Past Eva series from 1995 to 1997, Home Sweet Home series (1996) and the Worldly Life series (1997).

[12] For example, Two Treading Together Forever (2001) and
the Dream of Impermanence (2002).

[13] Freud had
discussed the complex meanings of the German word ‘unheimlich’ in his article on the Uncanny. ‘Unheimlich’ is obviously the
opposite of ‘heimlich’ (‘homely’) and ‘heimisch’
(‘native’), the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude
that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not
known and familiar. But, heimlich also connotes meanings
associated with secrecy, disagreeability, frightening, unfamiliarity and
untrustworthiness. Sigmund Freud, (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile
Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217-256.

[17] Wu Tianzhang,
Yang Maolin and Lu Tianyan were later welcomed and praised in
early 1990s by Ni Zaiqin, a nativist art scholar and critic and later the
director of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (the NTMFA) from 1997 to 2000, as the ones who really responded to Taiwan political reality in an earnest
local manner, as opposed to the other artists who were still practicing western
modernist fashions. This article was written in 1991 and started the series of debates on
the Taiwanese identity in Taiwanese art. See discussion below.

[19] The debates among Taiwanese art critics on “the local” and
“the Western” occurred during 1991 to 1993. This wave of debates was initiated
by Ni Zaiqin’s “Western Art, Made in Taiwan: A Critique on Modern Taiwan Art.”
It was followed by a series of debates from all sides, accumulating twenty-five
essays. Reviewing the arguments involved in the debate, we see clear repetition
of the debate held by the nativist “Xiangtu” movement against the modernist
literature in 1970s. Please consult Taiwan
Meishu zhong de Taiwan Yishi (The Taiwanese Consciousness in Taiwan Art:
Anthology of the Essays on the Taiwanese Art Debates in early 1990s.) Cf.
articles by Ni Zaiqin, Guo Shaozong, Liu Wensan, Lin Xingyue, collected in Taiwan Meishu zhong de Taiwan Yishi. Other similar debates arise in different
cultural field, the debates among literary scholars concerning
Taiwanese consciousness and Taiwanese subjectivity during 1993-1994 is one
other example.

[26] According to Lin Mun-lee, the director of the Taipei Fine
Arts Museum, the first exhibition in 1996 focused on memorializing the February
28 Incident and showed “pieces both directly and indirectly related to the
incident, including essays and photographs” and thus contained “educational and
historical significance” (Lin Mun-lee, “Director's Foreword” 1998, p. 7). Chen
Shui-bian also stressed specifically that the exhibition has to “bring the
artists’ work back around to the actual event, to demand that the artists look
closely at the event and enter into the historical circumstances surrounding
it” (Chen Shui-bian, “Mayor's Foreword”, p. 5). Through the narratives of 30
historical scenes selected and arranged chronologically by Vince Shih, with the
hope that the exhibition could “enter and understand history.”

[27] For the reactions to these exhibitions, please consult Xie
Li-Fa, “On the Role of the 2.28 Incident in Taiwan Art History,” 38-43; Huang
Bao-ping, “We do not see the Sadness, How do we talk about Sublimation—on
TFAM’s 2.28 Exhibition” 309-311; and the special issue on the 2.28 Exhibitions,
Xiandai Meishu (Modern Art). 70
(1997.2)